Balance your checkbook with Clearcheckbook

I have to confess I am rather into money management apps, although I never actually got into any of them, except for one of the best, Clearcheckbook. Let me state right from the beginning that this is not an automated service, so it won't pull stuff from your bank account. The reason I found it so good is exactly this, since I don't have US accounts, I can't really use Mint well for example. Clearcheckbook handles transactions entered by hand, but does it so elegantly and well that I was hooked straight from the beginning.

As I said, this is manual stuff, so it might take a while to set up and get used to, but from then on its smooth sailing. All you need to do is set up your accounts, set their initial amount and off you go.Whenever you need you can add transactions and transfers, all this in a smooth AJAX style no-reloading interface.

You can take a look at your summary on the front page, which gives some pretty good stats. I use Clearcheckbook mainly for managing my debt situation, which I am sorry to say is quite bad. However, Clearcheckbook helps a great deal because I can much better see the numbers, and feel good when my minuses go a bit higher (closer to zero that is).

This makes everything as segmented as possible with the least amount of effort. It also allows for some great reporting, like spending by category, statistics by account and whatnot. Also, whenever I see a good app being developed further I like it even more, and Clearcheckbook is just rolling out version 2 of its product. By the time you guys read this it will already be out, but as a translator I had a glimpse into the new interface and its pretty cool.

I actually only had one problem with it which was addressed. Since I live in Hungary my main currency here is HUF, while I mostly get paid in USD. In version 1 you could choose currencies, but not on an account basis, but on a global basis. Now you can tie a currency to an account which makes things one step easier.

Overall, Clearcheckbook is my type of application, clean, easy to use, hugely useful and work in progress, which just makes it better and better every day. I've actually never seen an app as good as this, if you know of any please let me know so I can try it out, but I need one which has an option to do everything manually. Try this out though, seriously, it's awesome.

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